By With new adages to the digital age like iCloud and ever-expanding databases, information has never been more accessible.
Along with its unreserved availability, the importance of filtering out the right information from the wrong information is becoming increasingly crucial for career success, said Microsoft’s Ken Fry.
Students gathered on Thursday at California State University, Long Beach’s design gallery for a panel that featured Microsoft’s industrial designer and design group director.
Fry offered his insight on important aspects of working in design and the future of the industry from a successful standpoint after working with Microsoft for over 20 years.
The Daily 49er spoke with Fry before his presentation to ask him a few one-on-one questions.
What pushed you in the direction of designing software as opposed to some of the other areas of design?
The story is that I was in a drawing class one day at the School of Art at the University of Washington, doing first quarter drawing. It was pretty fun. I kind of drew a picture of a still life there when a professor came by and said, “Looking at the way you draw, maybe you should get into industrial design.” I was like, “What’s industrial design?” Through some research, I found out what it was—and it was great. It was this perfect merging of art where you have the capacity to create visual solutions combined with wonderful constraints of actually designing something for human beings.
Is there a formula that you follow that you have found works, as far as pleasing the public and providing a high functioning product?
As designers, part of our job is to help innovate and show people new possibilities. The other part of our job is to actually take that new thing and ground it in something that’s familiar to people so that it doesn’t feel so crazy and new that you don’t know what to do about it. But to do that, it requires a level of creativity in how you work as a designer. It all starts with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. It’s [also] about collaborating with others. I think we do have to be careful about having too standard of a process, because every business problem is different, every human problem is different and, because of this, different processes are required.
Where do you see the computer design world going in the future?
There are kind of these three interrelated things that are happening in technology which are really important right now. The cloud is just becoming ubiquitous. It basically feeds all of our experiences [through] streaming. The second wave is really about mobile devices and mobility. They allow me to reach out into the cloud to actually get the stuff that matters most to me. The third area is social connectivity. Now we can connect with each other in ways that we never could before.
What types of technology can we expect to see coming out in the future?
The Microsoft Holo Lens is a really good example of how the worlds of software and hardware are merging into a single experience. The Holo Lens is a device that you wear on your head that does augmented reality where you can still see the environment around you but it overlays objects in that environment through a computer. It’s going to make our experiences more personal. I’d say [another] thing is that things are just going to get easier. In terms of technology as a constraint, for what you are trying to do, is just going to fade away.
What advice would you give somebody looking to enter the industry?
I think there are three things that really matter most when you’re going for a job in design. Number one is about finding the thing that you’re passionate about … and that you want to get up in the morning and do. The second thing is finding a really good problem to solve. Without a good problem to solve, your passion is sort of meaningless. In other words, is it something that you can actually fix with design? Is it, [in emerging economic countries] clean water? Or [is it] immunizations? Or [is it] childbirth? Is there something that I can use design for that is solving a real need in the world? Then the third area is the economic viability of it. In other words, can I get paid to do it?
